Dear old Dad left me a large heavy leather bag filled with his collection of pre 1964 quarters. He told me to wait until Silver hit $20 before I consider selling them. Its getting close to $20 now.
I was told a coin dealer is not going to be pleased with just a big bag of “junk” silver quarters and that if I sorted them into $100 Face Value bags. (I’m assuming this is 400 coins?), the dealer might be inclined to give me a better price. Don’t they just weigh the bag?
Should I just bring the bag in or should I sort the quarters into 400 coin bags?
I’m guessing that if your father was referencing the price of silver as part of advising you when to sell the bags, he was thinking more of the silver content than the coin value.
I imagine if you’re selling it for that purpose, they won’t care what form it’s in or how much is in the bag. They’ll just put it on the scale and weigh it- maybe after a brief check to make sure it’s not half-full of old fishing sinkers or something.
Rule of thumb. Divide the face value by 1.4 and multiply by the spot price of silver. That is how much the silver content would be worth so right now at $7.70 per ozt you have $550 worth of silver.
If you don’t bag it then they may go by a multiplier of the face value. At $17.70 the multiplier is about 12.8 but count on them overcharging you (14X or 15X) and undervaluing your coins (10X or 11X)
I took the contents of a large safety deposit box, filled with silver coins, down to the local rare coin shop several years ago. For the good stuff (including one Carson City silver 1893 dollar in fine condition), they paid me what I considered a very fair “buy” price. The mediocre coins were just bagged up and weighed. I was paid melt value for these.
I will say it is quite a thrill to have a dealer carefully holding up a shiny silver dollar, and announcing that he would buy it for $1,100. He mentioned that this was the fourth one of these coins that he had ever seen.
All of these coins, individually and bagged, brought me $11,700. All in cash, the bulk of it being in crisp new $100 bills. That was quite a sight. All in all, a very fun afternoon.
Dad turned over his collection of about 2000 silver quarters last Christmas when Silver was at about $15 an ounce. He was afraid that I was going to go out right then and cash them so he told me to wait for at least $20 before doing so. Its not a lot of money, just north of $6000 now.
He had a much larger collection at one time (10,000+ coins), but sold much of it when Silver hit $40 in the Spring of 2011. He never “bought” any quarters. His collecting started in the mid 60’s when the government stopped making Silver quarters. Any silver quarters he got in change, he kept. At some point he even would get bags of quarters from his bank and go through them, but he said he hadn’t seen any in circulation for many years.
Inflation? I’m sure that has huge effect of the actual value, but a 1964 quarter is now worth about $3.33, but a 1966 quarter is worth just that:25 cents.
Mangosteen may not want to bother, but depending on how carefully (if at all) his father screened those saved quarters, he might want to go through the bag looking for rarer dates that would be worth a significant premium.
As a former coin collector ( I sold my collection just* before* the Hunt Brothers decided they wanted to buy all the silver in the world) that’s the cheep ‘n’ ez way to get the most from your collection.
Invest in a cheap, run of the mill coin collector’s guide, then screen your 400 quarters for any dates and mint marks that stick out. A real coin dealer might pay more than “melt value” for those. As for the other 398 in the bag, just shop around to see who offers you the best price.
Ah. From your OP, I thought that maybe these quarters had been left to you in your father’s will and it might have been decades ago when $20 was worth a lot more than in today’s money. My assumptions were invalid, so please disregard.
My father invested in junk silver coins before he died, and I have some of them. If he bought them as junk silver, is it a pretty safe bet that there are no collectible coins in there? He bought these coins in the 80s and 90s.
Is there a handy way to calculate the value of dimes? I don’t imagine they’re worth much individually, but I have some number of pounds of them.
I went through the 2000 quarters and did find 2 or 3 non Washingtons, but they were in bad condition, couldn’t even read the date, so I am assuming they are only worth melt value. As far as “shopping around” goes, Silver just jumped to $18.40, but by the time I get to one shop it might have gone down (or up ) and I imagine the same thing might happen as I go from shop to shop. I probably would not be really comparing Apples to Apples. The price seems to be very unstable now changing hour to hour.
Another approach: Do you really need the cash, or would you rather have interesting goods (for yourself or someone else)? After you’ve got some idea of the melt value, you might be able to cut a deal with a silversmith by exchanging the quarters for a fair amount of finished belt buckles, jewelry, or the like. Christmas is coming up, and they’ll need the raw materials as much as you might need the presents.
If you are a terrible and unscrupulous person, you could do this:
[ol]
[li]pick all the valuable coins out of your stock[/li][li]package your stock into rolls with the valuable coins showing on the end[/li][li]make a YouTube video of you unpacking rolls of "aLL siLveR EndErs"markup.[/li][li]re-roll it, put your junk in that box, sell it on eBay[/li][/ol]
Thank you for your suggestion, but lately I’ve doing a “But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” and life has been pretty good. Its not really a Christian thing, its about choosing to “do good” from Peterson’s 12 RULES book, so I think I’ll pass on your idea.
